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The Battle for Hollywood began in earnest Monday night. No, really, it’s serious now, with the delayed start to the truncated NBA regular season still five days away.

Technically, the Clippers’ 114-95 exhibition win over the Lakers at Staples Center didn’t mean anything. Realistically, it meant a lot. It’s Act I of a drama that will run all season. Or maybe Act V or even X, considering all that has swirled around both franchises since the end of last season.

Here is what immediately preceded the first meeting for basketball supremacy in L.A.: In a Q&A with Yahoo! Sports posted Monday, Kobe Bryant says he wants to finish his career as a Laker: “I’ve been with this organization. I like being here. I like playing for the purple and gold. This is where I want to finish up.”

Yet he dropped enough hints about the organization, and other factors, to make one at least wonder how likely that will be if this season doesn’t go his way.

The Lakers have had worse offseasons, and even their worst would qualify as other franchises’ best. But this one was not stellar, and Bryant has not, and was not in this interview, hesitant to say so.

His reaction to the trade of Lamar Odom to the same Mavericks team that swept the then-two-time champs out of last season’s playoffs, in the wake of the nixed three-team trade for Chris Paul? “(Expletive). It’s tough because I didn’t know what was going on or why he got traded. Did he ask for a trade? Was it something we kind of facilitated? I didn’t know. It sucked.”

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We interrupt the latest attempt to idiot-proof the NBA rules to bring you breaking news from the land of the deservedly-rich:

The Los Angeles Lakers reportedly are trying to score not Chris Paul or Dwight Howard … but Chris Paul AND Dwight Howard.

Last NBA season, Chris Paul and Kobe Bryant met in the postseason. By next June, if they’re on the same team, the rest of the league should be afraid. (AP Photo)

A move like that can lead to only one thing—the Charlotte Bobcats and Cleveland Cavaliers voting to re-institute the lockout. It just isn’t fair, is it, that the smart franchises always end up with the best players, coaches, executives, scouts, cap-managers, attendance, revenues and championship trophies?

Well, it might lead to one other thing—a 2012 NBA Finals pitting a team that convinced LeBron James, Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh to take less money to play together, against a team that recently went to three straight Finals, then swapped its supporting cast for two perennial All-Stars and kept its centerpiece in place.

Not that any of that is guaranteed to happen, or even likely to—and that includes the Lakers getting Paul and Howard. Within seconds of the report emerging from ESPN Tuesday morning of the Lakers’ intentions to pursue the two, everybody who has ever covered the NBA began constructing scenarios that would prevent the Lakers from getting it done. They were all plausible, too, mainly because the very idea seems so implausible.

It’s also something that has most of the Lakers’ opposition changing their pants every two hours in sheer terror. Said an unnamed Western conference executive to ESPN: “If that does happen, it’ll make things much harder for us.’’ Understatement of the millennium.

So the reaction so far might be less, “Logistically, they can’t,” and more, “For the love of all that’s sacred in life, they can’t.”

But they can.

They’re the Lakers, and going back to when they managed to add Wilt Chamberlain to Jerry West and Elgin Baylor, they’ve found a way to stay the best. The NBA just shut itself down for five months to, essentially, keep the Lakers from acting like the Lakers. But in terms of players working their way to the franchises they want to play for, though—and of those franchises doing what needs to be done to get them — the lockout has changed little, if anything, a fact pointed out in this space very recently.

Adding CP3 and Superman to Kobe Bryant, though, would be the very essence of Laker-ness.

(For what it’s worth, Paul’s stated preference is the Knicks, forming a Big Three with Carmelo Anthony and Amar’e Stoudemire. That’s unlikely simply because of that franchise’s essential Knick-ness.)

Actually, the great irony of this reported maneuver is that the Lakers face an uphill climb to pull it off largely because Bryant rebelled against that Laker-ness years ago and made the team re-form around him, rather than around its usual multiple Hall of Famers.

So the assets they’d need to land Paul and Howard are sketchy—how much value Pau Gasol, Andrew Bynum and Metta World Peace have (yes, they’d definitely have to say “Peace out” to the former Ron Artest) remains to be seen. This isn’t exactly splitting up Shaq and Kobe, mind you. If you’ve forgotten the second-round implosion against Dallas last spring, you can bet Mitch Kupchak hasn’t, nor has the rest of the league.

A three-team trade is the minimum likely required for this. There haven’t been many four-team deals in NBA history, but with each new set of rules that accompany every labor deal, such trades get more spread out. A five-team play?

C’mon. You’re talking about a team that packaged Kwame Brown to get Gasol. That swapped Vlade Divac to the unsuspecting Charlotte Hornets to get the rights to Kobe. (More irony: if those Hornets get fleeced again by the same franchise.) That basically cleared out its entire roster to get salary room to sign Shaquille O’Neal. (An extra helping of irony? If Orlando loses a once-in-a-generation big man, with the same “Superman” nickname, to the same team 15 years apart.)

If it means making this kind of a landscape-altering deal, they’ll bring in the Marlins and Albert Pujols to get it done.

Different general managers, different coaching regimes, different owners, even different Busses in charge. Once the Lakers of any era decide they’re going all in to win more championships, pack their arena, organize more victory parades and remain Hollywood’s team of choice, not much can stop them.

These aren’t the Dream Team Eagles or even the Hold-That-Pose, Fake-That-Cough Heat; those 16 banners indicate something a little above and beyond. That’s one behind the Celtics … and, if memory serves, they weren’t supposed to be able to manage reeling in both Ray Allen and Kevin Garnett in the same summer, either. They’re the reason Boston is still one banner in the lead.

So the Lakers now have their own Big Three in their sights. Don’t be foolish enough to think it can’t be done. If it does happen, it won’t be the big-market bogeyman making it possible.

Just the same thing that always haunts the bottom-feeders: some teams are smarter than others.

Read more: http://aol.sportingnews.com/nba/story/2011-12-06/when-lakers-dream-impossible-deal-its-time-to-be-afraid#ixzz1fnfzP78w

Though there are still plenty of details to work out, the dust is beginning to settle on the tentative agreement that the NBA‘s players and owners announced early Saturday morning. The big-picture tally is clear: The owners won, the players lost. But there are more specific winners and losers in this NBA drama:

Winners

David Stern. It hasn’t been a great few months for Stern. He did not have the same grip over his owners that he has had in the past, he certainly didn’t come off well publicly, and he has now overseen three lockouts in his last four collective-bargaining negotiations. But make no mistake, Stern got his owners 75-80 percent of what they were looking for in this deal, and if he had to take some public battering to do so, well, that’s part of the job.

Sen. Herb Kohl. Hardline small-market owners were the big winners here, even if they did not get everything they sought. The problem for most of them was that they frequently came off like dolts. There was the Paul Allen “hijacking” of one meeting, there was Dan Gilbert telling Billy Hunter to “trust his gut,” and there was much public discussion about the hypocrisy of Michael Jordan’s hardline position. But Kohl is one of the few who did what an owner should do in these situations—he stayed in the shadows, laid out what changes he hoped to see and let Stern do his work. This deal will benefit teams like Kohl’s Bucks, and it will help that Kohl didn’t drag down his team’s reputation by acting foolish.

Rashard Lewis and the Wizards. There will be an amnesty clause in the new deal that will allow teams to waive a player without his contract counting against the luxury tax. It won’t take Washington long to dump Lewis and get out of the remaining two years and $46 million on his contract. But Lewis has to be counted as a winner, too, because he will still collect that money and may have the opportunity to sign with a better team than the rebuilding Wizards.

Pacers. They’re a young team with lots of cap space, and the new salary rules will make it very difficult for teams near the luxury tax threshold to keep their own free agents. This CBA was designed to help teams like Indiana bring in top players, and the Pacers should reap the benefits immediately.

Dwight Howard. No franchise tag, no limitations on extend-and-trade deals, no limitations on sign-and-trades for the first two years of this CBA. That means Howard will have every opportunity to be this year’s Carmelo Anthony, able to sign on to stay in Orlando or leverage his way to a bigger market. Read More >>

New York state Sen. Malcolm A. Smith (D-Queens) is taking a page from activists around the country and organizing an “Occupy the NBA” movement that starts in New York on Wednesday and will expand to other markets if the league and union are not able to settle their labor dispute by Dec. 11, the New York Daily News reports.

Smith is leading a group of people affected by the lockout—including restaurant owners and workers, parking attendants, concessionaires, season-ticket holders and other NBA fans—in a demonstration in front of Madison Square Garden. Additionally, Smith is branding Dec. 11 as “A Day of Solidarity” and has reached out to officials in Chicago and Los Angeles who will organize similar protests in front of their cities’ NBA arenas.

“What you’re really talking about is a number of people on the low end of the totem pole who need their jobs to allow them to continue to keep their families alive and moving forward,” Smith told the Daily News. “If you don’t want to settle it, we have season-ticket holders who want back their money. You have it, give it back. Stop bickering about the millions of dollars that you guys already make. And think about the little person.”

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If NBA owners have their way in their collective-bargaining fight with the players, the league landscape will change so that, in the future, so-called “superteams”—like the one LeBron James, Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh formed in Miami—probably won’t be possible. Tougher salary restrictions, coupled with limiting contracts to force NBA players to stay with their original teams, would make the continuation of this trend difficult.

“The competitive issues for us as owners are as big as the economic issues, particularly in the small markets,” Spurs owner Peter Holt, who chairs the league’s labor relations committee, said. “We have been going back and forth for two years and we’re still far apart. This is extremely important for all owners, and for players and in particularly our fans. We want to get to a point where all 30 teams have an opportunity to compete and make a few bucks.”

The goal, commissioner David Stern has suggested, is to have star players populate rosters all over the league, with teams filling out the rest of the lineup with a secondary star and role players. That sort of set-up, the league feels, will keep teams from stockpiling too many good players, and ensure competitive balance.

Scientifically speaking, they’re right. And while Stern’s aim has been to curb total spending, a study conducted by professors at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management and Stanford business school shows that, in the NBA, one of the deciding factors in team success is not just total money spent, but “pay dispersion.” That is to say, the teams that win are the ones that have a top tier of pay going to a small number of players, who are surrounded by lower-paid role players. Players then establish an instinctual hierarchical structure based on how much they’re paid.

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For NBA followers, the utter lack of optimism surrounding the labor negotiations is bad enough. What emerged from, and about, the league’s owners after the latest talks crashed and burned last week is even worse.

Never mind the fate of this season. Whether the next game is played this year or next, the fans really have to wonder what kind of NBA everybody will come back to. With the tone of numerous reports following the end of the talks, there’s reason to believe that a segment of owners are involved in this only to better the sale price for when they unload their franchises after a new labor deal is signed.

NBA commissioner David Stern was absent from the most recent NBA labor meeting.
Meaning that this is not, in fact, about the long-term health of the NBA, as the league has put out to the public for years. This is about the short-term payoff for the very people holding the sport hostage.

And there doesn’t appear to be anything anybody can do about it. Not even David Stern. Actually, if what was reported a few days ago by Yahoo! Sports is true, his reason for missing the last day of negotiations last week—a bout of the flu—was a smokescreen to allow Portland owner Paul Allen to impose his presence on the talks.

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In the wake of the inability of the NBA and players’ union to come to an agreement to end the three-month-old lockout Tuesday, both sides have positioned themselves as prepared to hunker down and wait out a long labor stalemate.

But a key point to remember is this: The league has not yet canceled regular-season games, and commissioner David Stern was careful to say that he would not take that step until Monday.

That could open the door, sources told Sporting News on Wednesday, to a solution that comes down this weekend on the most contentious issue of the negotiations—the split of basketball-related income (BRI). On Tuesday, the NBA formally made an offer of 47 percent of BRI to the players, while the union said it would not go below 53 percent. The source said that, over the weekend, the two sides could land on a split of 51 percent to players-49 percent to owners, down from the 57 percent that players received under the last collective-bargaining agreement.

In Tuesday’s negotiating session, the league floated an idea for a compromise with a 50-50 split of BRI. It was

not a formal offer, but either way, the union turned it down before the idea could advance.

The union was willing to go down to 52 percent, meaning, essentially, the two sides were just two percentage points apart on BRI.

Logically, that is far too thin a margin over which to risk losing games. Comparing this lockout to the one that cost the league 32 games in 1998-99, union executive director Billy Hunter said, “The cost is much more significant now as opposed to 1998 simply because the revenues the league generates. We know that if we’re locked out for a year, each side stands to lose about $2.2 billion. In the case of the players, every month that we’re locked out, it amounts to $350 million. So I think the owners feel the same kind of impact, coupled with the overall damage to the system itself—to what extent are people willing to come back if the game is lost?”

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